Syntax

How to Own Without ‘Have’: The Be-Languages

In languages like English, you 'have' a book. But in Russian, Irish, or Turkish, you would say "to me there…

5 months ago

The Sentence Tree: How AI Parses Grammar

Ever wonder how your smart assistant untangles a complex question or how machine translation works so well? It's not magic;…

5 months ago

The Ghost in the Object: Spain’s Personal ‘a’

Ever wonder why Spanish speakers say "Veo a María" but "Veo la mesa"? This grammatical quirk, known as the "personal…

5 months ago

Leísmo, Laísmo, Loísmo: Spain’s Pronoun War

In the world of Spanish grammar, a quiet war rages on. The combatants are three tiny pronouns—le, la, and lo—and…

5 months ago

The Forest for the Trees: Inside Linguistic Treebanks

Ever wonder how your phone understands complex questions? Behind every major advance in AI and search technology is a massive,…

5 months ago

Can a Language Have No Adjectives?

How would you describe a "big red ball" in a language with no words for "big" or "red"? Many languages…

5 months ago

Birdsong Syntax: Are Birds Using Grammar?

We often dismiss birdsong as simple alarms or mating calls, but what if birds are forming simple sentences? Groundbreaking research…

5 months ago

The Hidden Grammar of Emojis

Far from being simple digital decorations, emojis follow a complex and unwritten grammar that dictates their meaning. The order of…

5 months ago

Parsing the Unparsable: The Dhaasanac Language

Journey to the Omo Valley to meet the Dhaasanac people of Ethiopia, whose language defies easy categorization. Instead of marking…

5 months ago

The Syntax of Sheet Music

We often speak of music as a "universal language", but beyond the metaphor lies a tangible, non-verbal writing system of…

5 months ago

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